Search

People using mobile devices for making phone calls, accessing the internet, or posting georeferenced contents in social media create episodic digital traces of their presence in various places. Availability of personal traces over a long time period makes it possible to detect repeatedly visited places and identify them as home, work, place of social activities, etc. based on temporal patterns of the person’s presence. Such analysis, however, can compromise personal privacy. We propose a visual analytics approach to semantic analysis of mobility data in which traces of a large number of people are processed simultaneously without accessing individual-level data. After extracting personal places and identifying their meanings in this privacy-respectful manner, the original georeferenced data are transformed to trajectories in an abstract semantic space. The semantically abstracted data can be further analyzed without the risk of re-identifying people based on the specific places they attend.

We demonstrate interactive visual embedding of partition-based clustering of multidimensional data using methods from the open-source machine learning library Weka. According to the visual analytics paradigm, knowledge is gradually built and refined by a human analyst through iterative application of clustering with different parameter settings and to different data subsets. To show clustering results to the analyst, cluster membership is typically represented by color coding. Our tools support the color consistency between different steps of the process. We shall demonstrate two-way clustering of spatial time series, in which clustering will be applied to places and to time steps.